Tuesday, February 12, 2013

My parents met in a concentration camp in Germany toward the end of World War II.My mom had been brought to Germany by the Nazis to work in a slave labor camp. The day she was captured she saw her mom and her sister and her sister's baby killed by German soldiers. My mom was crying so much when she got to the camp that one of the guards said if she didn't stop crying they would shoot her.Near the end of the war, my dad and some other slave laborers were brought to my mom's camp by German guards who were escaping the Russians. The Germans left him there and fled toward the American lines. When my mom saw my dad, he was a scarecrow in rags. He weighed about 70 pounds and had only one eye. He had lost the other when a guard clubbed him for begging for food.She was 23, he was 25. She had been a slave for 2 years, he had been one for 4.They met in that camp, and after liberation they did what a lot of people did. First, they had something to eat, and then they got married.It was a hell of a marriage. They fought and argued for the next 50 years -- even on Sunday mornings -- and even on Christmas Day.It got so bad at times that -- after we came to America -- my sister and I would plead with my parents to get a divorce.They never did. When my dad died in 1997, they were still married. 52 years.When I was about 57 or 58, I started wondering why they didn't get a divorce, why they stayed together through all the misery they put each other through. The answer to that question became a poem in my book about them, Lightning and Ashes. The poem is called "Why My Mother Stayed with My Father."Why My Mother Stayed with My FatherShe knew he was worthless the first timeshe saw him in the camps: his blind eye,his small size, the way his clothes carriedthe smell of the dead men who wore them before.In America she learned he couldn’t fix a leakor drive a nail straight. He knew nothingabout the world, the way the planets moved,the tides. The moon was just a hole in the sky,electricity a mystery as great as death.The first time lightning shorted the fuses,he fell to his knees and prayed to Blessed Maryto bring back the miracle of light and lamps.He was a drunk too. Some Fridays he drankhis check away as soon as he left work.When she’d see him stagger, she’d knock him downand kick him till he wept. He wouldn’t crawl away.He was too embarrassed. Sober, he’d begin the bars on Division for food or renttill even the drunks and bartenderstook pity on this dumb polack.My father was like that, but he stayedwith her through her madness in the campswhen she searched among the dead for her sister,and he stayed when it came back in America.Maybe this was why my mother stayed.She knew only a man worthless as mud,worthless as a broken dog would sufferwith her through all of her sorrow.________If you want to read more about my parents, you can check out a couple of the blogs here that talk mostly about them. One is called DPs in the Polish Triangle about what my mom and dad were like when they got to America. Another is called The Wooden Trunk We Carried With Us From Germany. There's also The Day My Mother Died. Just click on the above titles, and it will take you right to them.

About Me

I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press).